“Finance is working hard to improve financial discipline around enterprise digital spending.” 

Digital projects are unfamiliar, uncertain, and dispersed, making it difficult for finance leaders to vet assumptions, set KPIs up front, or hold anyone accountable for outcomes. 

“Improving financial discipline around digital spending is hard, and on its own will be insufficient to drive better outcomes.” 

“Organizations that maximize the value of their digital spending do so by creating digital cohesion: managing interdependencies to achieve optimal connectivity of digital initiatives in service of specific, enterprise-level outcomes.”

“Digital cohesion requires cross-functional partnership. While only 30% of CFOs and CIOs enjoy a strong partnership, those that do see measurably better outcomes from their enterprise digital spending.” 

“Sustaining digital cohesion calls for embedding management of digital interdependencies in enterprise processes, which finance must drive as the owner of investment governance.” 

“To address digital conservatism from accounting teams, finance leaders need to address the problems that accounting tend to feel they have to clean up.” 

“Most companies are setting their digital vision statements at too high a level.  As a result, it is masking the disagreements that truly exist between organizational functions, such as finance, procurement and sales.” 

“Gartner’s survey asking more than 100 controllers about their digital transformations found that 77% of the time, disagreements between organizational functions slowed down the transformation.”

“There are three key aspects to addressing this: 

• First, set measurable, time-bound, digital objectives. 

• Second, structure your digital working group for alignment by creating a standardized business case template for digital initiatives.”

• Third, establish clear criteria to surface misalignment.”

“It’s key to understand the different kinds of digital talent, how they match up to your function’s needs, and to recruit accordingly.”

“Your digital transformation needs to be well-scoped and clearly defined, and you’ll need some form of central finance IT team already in place.”

“When ready to hire dedicated digital finance talent, finance leaders need to figure out what those people actually care about most in terms of the role and communicate this clearly in any job descriptions.”

“When sourcing candidates, don’t be constrained by traditional role definitions. Scout for adjacent skills internally and externally because even where a candidate may not be a perfect match, the process of upskilling is potentially more efficient.”

“Embrace unconventional talent sources with the right skillsets. Alternative talent models can help organizations meet new skills needs at a lower cost than full-time employees.”

“Failing to track technology at an enterprise level has the effect of creating opacity and silos that allow value killers to thrive.”

“If the business makes decisions on applications or systems without consulting IT this can lead to much higher integration costs and increased risk.”

“A holistic view of technology spend is needed in the enterprise to avoid the duplicative and hidden costs of silos, to ensure that ownership and accountability for projects is clear and business cases include all real world costs.”

“There is no standard  definition for enterprise-wide technology spend, like there is for traditional IT spend, so CFOs should take the lead in defining what technology does, and does not, need to be tracked and governed at the enterprise level.”

“Work across the C-suite to co-create digital governance that is optimized for speed, focused on the risks and customer experience, and is integrated throughout the customer journey.”

“The CFO’s role in such a shared governance structure is to drive enterprise-wide tech spend strategy. The CIO should partner with the CFO in tracking the spend. CIOs also should influence the right tech investments, as well as be accountable for most IT costs.”